


the lone wolf dies

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dubious Ethics, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Series, all Remus Lupin's friends are dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3138044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus Lupin's war did not end on Hallowe'en, 1981.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the lone wolf dies

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Bella, to match a drawing in the palette art meme that went around a while ago. The quote is from Game of Thrones, a show I don’t even know, but it seemed highly appropriate – when winter comes, ‘the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives’. I can no longer remember where I picked up the headcanon that Neville Longbottom’s learning difficulties, which he learns to manage over the course of the series, are at least partially a consequence of a poorly-administered Memory Charm inflicted on him in the wake of his parents’ untimely death, but I didn’t originate it and would like to credit whoever did. Also, I do not endorse some of the tactics Remus and Molly (at the very least) are clearly engaged in here, but would like to note that many things about HP-verse are equally disturbing.

            Hermione – clever, quick Hermione, sweet down to her bones – once asked Remus what he was like when he was younger. You can’t always have been tired, she said, and she was right, so Remus told her: yes, you’re right; I wasn’t like this; I was angry, instead. And Hermione looked like she didn’t understand, and Remus prays Hermione never will have to understand, because if Harry is Lily once more, and Ron is Sirius, loyal and brave and too prone to looking without leaping for such a good chess-player, then he sees himself in Hermione. He sees the destruction Hermione could wreak if she wanted to, her raw power, her ruthlessness and her quick learning taking the place of his guile and the skills he learnt in years of dirty war, and he knows the destruction revenge would wreak on her in turn. He hopes that in the coming war, Hermione is not the last one left standing. Not like he was. Hermione is clever and quick before she’s loving and sweet, and she would go just the same way he did.

 

            Remus Lupin’s war did not end in October 1981. It did not end with James’s body on the hall carpet of the house in Godric’s Hollow, his shattered glasses on the floor; Lily curled up so lovely and so silent before her baby’s cradle. It did not even end with Sirius laughing hysterically on a Muggle high street or Peter gone, dead, vanished, nothing left of him but a little finger. It did not end, because Remus was still alive, and the flame that had been guttering and flickering and threatening to die in the face of every new loss, every new death’s head ( _Morsmordre!_ and there are more bodies to bury, more widows to console) lit bright again and burnt faster.

 

            Remus, twenty-one and too young to be the last one left, went to Dumbledore and said _give me work_ , and Dumbledore did. Greyback and his kind are still on the prowl, still looking for innocent dinners, and Remus needs no encouragement to go after them and bring them in, dead or alive – mostly dead. They’re making a pale pretence of hiding, but none of them has concealed lycanthropy from a schoolful of inquisitive adolescents for practice or cares enough to be particularly good at it, and none of them knows Remus Lupin’s true name. He was always quick with a lie, and these days, he is even faster with a memory charm. He teaches supply; it takes him wherever he needs to go, lets him get close to each pack’s den, lets him slip in and out. He calls himself by a number of interchangeable common names and varies the subjects he teaches. It is easy to mug up English, French, Maths as taught by Muggles, although the sciences and history would give him grief if he tried. Later it will be very difficult to remember to ask his students for six inches of parchment, not six hundred words. He vanishes between one day and the next and nobody ever looks for him. Oh, he’s good, he’s very _very_ good.

 

            He causes a number of nasty accidents to happen to a number of nasty people. He knows how much it must pain their packs to lose them, but he does not care. His own pack is gone, every last one of them right down to Harry, little green-eyed wolf cub far from home. Dumbledore will not tell Remus where he sent the boy, which is probably safest, since Remus looks in the mirror and knows he’s mad. Lunatic: moon-touched. He never had a chance to be anything else.

 

            Remus promises himself Greyback’s head. He gets that, he kills the single worst rogue werewolf west of the Tigris and Voldemort’s most powerful werewolf ally, and he can call it quits and say his vengeance is done. Greyback is the price of his revenge for Harry’s losses. It’s almost impossibly high a price, almost impossible, but Remus has done a lot of things he didn’t think were possible and the price Harry has paid for being born to the wrong people at the wrong time is almost impossibly high, too. So it’s fitting.

 

            Greyback is his prey. He hunts to strip Greyback of his pack, of his defences.

 

            Later, before Hermione asks her questions – before he knows there is a Hermione to ask questions – Remus will look at pictures of himself from this time and not recognise himself. The hair and features are right – non-descript colouring, thin-faced with high cheekbones, a long broad nose slightly crooked, small eyes – but the flat thin line of his mouth is as unfamiliar as the harsh look in his eyes, and of course, while he is often covered in blood, it is usually his own. In these photographs it isn’t.

 

            He looks like a wolf.

 

            He calls it off some time in 1984. According to Moody, the Aurors are starting to join the dots, and while Remus does not care very much about whether they find him at the end of their dotted line or not, he does care about whether Greyback does. He will not be caught, and turned, and used. But he’s still deciding which job will be his last (this woman, perhaps? She makes her self-defence students love her then bites them and makes them her toys instead; shall he kill her and say that’s his revenge for Lily? Remus has been waiting to chalk somebody special up for Lily, somebody particularly cruel and awful, and finding somebody Lily would want out of the world has been a challenge) when he stumbles into Molly and Arthur’s safehouse and comes up sharply at the end of Molly’s wand.

 

            “Finest duellist in your generation,” Remus says, going cross-eyed, “Flitwick told me.”

 

            The wand does not move. “Who have you brought here?” Molly demands. She has to be good: she and her children are the last true Prewetts and the Death Eaters had a real hate on for them. Little Charlie is only alive because his mother moved very fast for someone eight months pregnant.

 

            “Nobody,” Remus says, rather surprised. “I blew them all up in Dagenham. Molly, please believe me when I say I wouldn’t bring Death Eaters to your door.”

 

            Molly casts a truth spell on him, the kind of very illegal charm that runs in the old families and is about as reliable, but three times as dangerous as, Veritaserum. She sniffs, and she turns away. “Nobody knows what you’ll do any more, Remus.”

 

            “Really?” Remus says. “May I have a cup of tea?”

 

            “Go and wash up. Top of the stairs, second door on the left. Wake the baby and I’ll kill you myself.”

 

            Meekly, Remus goes, but the sight of himself in the mirror stops him dead. He looks like the monster he is, and for once – in a children’s bathroom, surrounded by rubber ducks and bubble bath – that doesn’t please him. His shirt is ripped to hell and clawed, his tie ruined, his trousers spattered with mud and blood. The tweed jacket with the elbow patches James and Lily bought him as a joke is torn and stained, and it’s nothing he can’t fix, but…

 

            But.

 

            “You look a state,” says the mirror.

 

            “Shut up,” Remus retorts. “The kids are sleeping.”

 

            He’s clean when he goes downstairs, and a few charms get the stains out of his clothes, and Molly lends him a sewing kit. He does all her laundry and mending to say thank you. Molly sits up with him, her hands wrapped around coffee heavily laced with Pepper-Up. It’s the kind of concoction that will keep her awake for hours, but Remus is in no position to be judging anyone else’s decisions. Her brown eyes are heavy and weary, purple smudges underneath them, and Arthur is out very late for an uxorious man with seven small children. But then, Remus does not know exactly what the other members of Dumbledore’s clean-up crew do; he’s too much of a loose cannon to be told. From Molly’s face, it’s plain that she knows all too well what Arthur is doing.

 

            Remus has never known a man like Arthur for charming inanimate objects. He’s even better than James, who had a gift for it. And he can see a charm or transfiguration on an apparently innocuous object no matter how well it’s hidden. There are all kinds of things he could be up to, all kinds of bits of revenge he could be seeking – but no, not Arthur, not revenge. No. Remus thinks of the names on the doors he passed on the way upstairs, Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred and George and Ron and Ginny. Arthur doesn’t want revenge; he’s looking for a safer world for his children.

 

             Remus wonders if he chose another night to fall through the Burrow’s front door, would he find Molly gone, and Arthur sitting, waiting? And would there be a notice in the paper the next day, sad death of a Nott, or a Lestrange, or a Black connection somewhere on the continent? Duel of honour, or suicide, or robbery gone wrong?

 

            He doesn’t know which of them frightens him more. Both are terrible in their single-minded determination to salvage a world that is safe for their children. Their six boys, their single girl.

 

            Their motives make Remus’s look even more tarnished. Remus has been killing on behalf of the dead; Arthur and Molly are fighting for the living.

 

            “I think I’ve had enough of this,” he says to Molly at about two o’clock in the morning. The dog-tooth tweed is almost intact again, as if he’d never ripped it.

 

            Molly doesn’t look up from her third coffee or the pile of immaculate mending Remus has laid at her feet. “It’s about time you realised it won’t bring any of them back.”

 

             Remus almost grins, and then he cries, which leads to Bill getting caught sneaking a midnight snack, and everything is chaos and Arthur arrives back at just the wrong moment and Bill asks a lot of questions none of the adults are going to answer truthfully. Eventually Remus tells him that he got into a fight and Arthur was talking to a lawyer for him, and yes it was a fight against bad guys, of course it was, but h’shh, it’s a secret, just between you and me and your parents, don’t tell anyone, I can trust you can’t I. Of course he can, particularly if Bill doesn’t quite remember what happened in the first place. Obliviate charms are only the crudest weapon in an obliviator’s armoury, and they do damage, especially to young children: Neville Longbottom will take years to shake off the effects of a panicking Auror who just wanted the baby not to have seen his parents dying under torture. Remus just blunts the edges for Bill, with Molly and Arthur’s full consent since they don’t want him to remember this either, and sends him off to bed full of self-importance, and swears an oath across Molly and Arthur’s kitchen table: _enough_.

 

            Old habits die very hard. Remus goes back to supply teaching and chooses his jobs by sticking pins into a map instead of obeying Dumbledore’s oblique hints. He can’t get a magical job, but with false papers Muggle ones are wide open to him. He’s good at getting an understanding of his students, their parents, his colleagues. He always learns and remembers more about them than he really should, but he never does anything other than phone in a tip to the local police. He needs to learn how to be a good citizen again, instead of a vigilante.

 

            He does it. And then somebody calls him to war again, and it’s not Dumbledore, who he could have said no to: it’s Harry.

 

            Harry James Potter calls him to war, and Remus is reminded that he never managed to kill Greyback and call it quits, for Harry’s sake. So Remus John Lupin answers.

 

            It’s the death of him, but at least he has a pack again.


End file.
